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New Shepard is the flagship rocket of Blue Origin’s space tourism business. At the bottom sits a booster rocket, six stories high, and at the top sits a capsule that can seat up to six crew members.

The sub-orbital rocket is named after Alan Shepard, who was the first American to reach space and one of the astronauts to walk on the moon in 1961. It departs from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One, a launch pad in rural West Texas about 100 miles from El Paso.

The full task takes about 10 minutes. New Shepard is launched to an altitude of about 63 miles, a widely recognized marker where space begins and known as the Kármán line.

At highest altitude, the booster rocket releases its crewed capsule. The booster then begins a low to the ground and re-ignites its single engine to land vertically on a concrete slab five miles from where it was launched.

At the same time that it returned to space, the crew capsule was suspended in a free fall at an altitude of about 63 miles. Alongside the experience of nearly four minutes of weightlessness in microgravity, passengers also experience views of Earth’s gently curved horizon, where its atmosphere meets space. Each seat has its own 3.5 feet x 2.3 feet window.

“I’m excited and worried, a little nervous and a little scared about this brand new adventure,” Mr. Shatner said in an interview with NBC’s “Today” on Monday.

During Blue Origin’s first crewed flight in July, passengers unbuckled the 530 cubic feet of capsule and glided off, enjoying weightlessness. They threw candy at each other and somersaulted before returning to their places.

During the capsule’s free fall to land, it opens an initial set of parachutes to curb its speed, followed by three large sets of parachutes to smoothly descend the capsule at around 15 miles per hour. Milliseconds before landing in the desert – again not too far from the launch pad – the capsule releases a burst of air from its underside to soften the landing. The seats inside are supported by a scissor-like mechanism that further limits the impact.

Blue Origin boasted that the windows in New Shepard’s crew capsule were the largest to fly in space, but Elon Musk’s SpaceX took the edge off when it launched the Crew Dragon capsule into low Earth orbit in September. a new glass dome It stretches 46 inches wide and 18 inches deep and covers a total of 2,000 square inches.